Sep 17, 2012

first week(s) of school

Things have been fantastically busy since the fall semester started. I'm working in two different departments, so I get to deal with two different people for every single thing. Basically twice the opportunity for everything to go wrong. I'm also teaching credit classes that don't have assigned books which has meant spending a whole lot of time preparing materials for the semester. And also dealing with the occasional sketchiness along the way.

Like going to my classroom and finding it locked, which has happened quite a bit and can usually be easily resolved. So a student went to find the key, while we all waited. After a really long time, he hadn't returned, so I went to see what the hold up was. Upon seeing me, a foreigner, the admin later started running and handed us a 마스터 키. Since it was a master key, I assumed it would work for all rooms in the building, but no, it didn't work on our classroom. We all had to walk on down the four flights of stairs and over to the library to my conversation classroom. Which was littered with books and papers from lesson planning, so I had to quickly collect everything and still try to keep some semblance of of a legit university credit class. And then class was only interrupted about 5 times by people wandering in and phone calls from the department about the classroom change, so yeah, sketchiest class ever.And then there was also the awesome moment when I found out that instead of using my office phone number, they opted to just post my personal phone number to every single student. So yeah, not the most stellar start of the semester.

That's what makgeolli is good for.

But my teaching schedule has enabled me to avoid a welcoming/farewell party of awkwardness, so I can't say it's all bad.